Poor Mobile Shopping Experience Can be Fatal for Retailers

Retailers should come out with omni-channel strategies that attempt to offer consistent user experiences across the different shopping channels, thus improving customer satisfaction and retention. According to recent studies, your mobile customer may not return to your mobile website or app if they go through a poor mobile experience.

71% of the smartphone users shop for products on their mobile. Of these, 88% have encountered negative experience at least once. In this case, 29% of the consumers claim they will wait for another year before they visit the mobile site of their favorite retailer, post the bad experience, while 30% customers claim they will never revisit the mobile site after the bad experience.

When asked about the bad experience, mobile shoppers say that sites that are hard to navigate or use can lead to bad experience. Images play an important role in making the overall user experience good or bad for the users. Security is another concern, which leads to poor or good user experience on mobile sites.

Read on to know how mobile influences shoppers

Impact of Mobile on Shoppers

To understand the impact of mobile on shoppers, you need to understand how they are using the smartphones to complete their shopping. It is also important to understand how they are going to use it in the near future. While mobile devices are important for retail, the impact is yet to be realized. The mobile retail does not impact direct sales from mobile sites; instead, they tend to influence traditional in-store conversions, and increase the orders. A few statistics will help understand how mobile is influencing shoppers

• Approximately 58% of smartphone owners use it for in-store shopping • 49% of the consumers shop in electronics & appliance categories while 19% use it in gas stations and stores

The mobile influence factor for retail depends on store category, mobile adoption and the frequency of usage in the stores. Currently mobile influence has led to a store sales of over $200 Bn (an approximate figure), which will increase exponentially in the coming times. The reason would be increased adoption of mobile, reduced barriers of usage and improved mobile functionality.

Impact of Poor Experience

A lot of people visit the mobile sites or app to quickly look at the products or just search for things that they might want to buy from the store later. Despite the visits, a lot of people don’t actually purchase from the mobile app or site. One of the major reasons could be attributed to the loading time. If your site takes more time than necessary to load, then your user is going to abandon, and move to your competitor’s site.

In case your app or site is not functioning properly, then your customers will move away and not come back to you. A poor mobile experience will leave a negative impact on the bottom line, which will in turn affect loyalty and retention capabilities of your brand. The poor checkout process, ineffective navigation, or other issues can lead to incoherent experience that in turn affects your visitor’s loyalty.

Know how to enhance user experience on mobile

Enhancing the User Experience

If you want to reduce cart abandonments, you need to focus on innovation and be more approachable to your customers.

Reduce Negative Surprises: As a retailer, when you are thinking of user experience on mobile, you need to first reduce the negative surprises that can eventually cause abandonment. This includes stock out of inventory, out-dated pricing, etc. You need to meet your customer’s expectations in order to make them stay on-board. You need to keep the pricing up-to-date, promotions should be placed across sites where the customer is most-likely to see you and improve both front-end and back-end experience.

Understand the Purpose: Know what your customers are planning to use the mobile for. Are they planning to use it for reviews or, to search for promotions or deals available online? The purpose will help you provide insightful design to the mobile app or site, making searching easy. Information that the customers are looking for should be central to your mobile app/site user experience strategy.

Embrace Innovations:Single page checkout process and other innovative approaches to reduce the frustrations that your customer might experience when they visit your mobile store. Your checkout process should be defined for omni-channel. The idea is to offer what the customer expects at the checkout as well as the in-store POS, thus improving brand loyalty.

It is important to build your brand’s loyalty for customer retention, which requires embracing customer’s needs and offering them what they are looking for. Mobile user experience is crucial to retailers, and they should design enriched experience that can convert into stable customers for their brand.

Deepa is a technical content writer at Silver Touch Technologies. She loves researching and exploring new cutting edge technologies in depth and detail. With a sound technical knowledge and a deep love for writing, she offers well researched and informative content for a wide range of readers.